The debate over the five-paragraph essay is not new. If you’ve checked any online discussion groups of writing faculty lately, or participated in some of the recent meetings going on in our department, you have been assured that questions of form vs. function are being roundly considered, if not squarely faced. The opinions encountered in these discussions often meander into the sort of “agree/disagree” language that is, ironically, so prevalent in the five-paragraph essay itself. After taking part in one of these sessions, I often come away with the feeling that I ought to fall in with one side or the other. One ought to decide.
And yet, decide what? Whether the five paragraph essay is an accessible platform for student writing? It is. Whether student voices should be developed? They should. Whether students must be initiated into academic discourse communities? Of course they must. Embedded in each of these questions is a pedagogical agenda that may or may not have anything to do with how a student gets ideas down on paper. These are the questions that are often put in the service of discrediting one type of writing and favoring another; however, I think we should really be questioning not which items we teach, but how we teach them.
That said, I have come to regard the five paragraph essay with some suspicion lately. One reservation I have concerns the very accessibility that has made it such a favorite in writing classrooms for so long. Constructing a five paragraph essay is often presented as a mechanical task, something like constructing a ham sandwich. You put the thesis statement here, we say to students. The topic sentences go here and here and here, examples go here, then you put it on a plate, add a pickle, and you’re done. We diagram this procedure for students, or give them forms to fill in. After they’ve managed to put the appropriate thoughts in the appropriate boxes, we then say, “Now, clean it up.”
Flippant though I am, I would never accuse our faculty of making light of student work. I firmly believe in the conscientiousness and expertise of my colleagues, no matter what their pedagogical preferences are. But I am saying that presenting writing as a formulaic exercise is disingenuous. Why should we present something that is messy, difficult, and prone to disaster as a simple matter of putting the right information in the right slots? We all know better. This is the wrong message for us to send to naïve or inexperienced students, who may well conclude that as long as they master a few neat tricks, they are in the clear.
This may verge on the same complaint adversaries of the five paragraph essay make when they contend that writing by formula discourages students from thinking. I know I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last, to point out that the ubiquitous phrase “in my opinion” is mighty weak logic, and that three “supporting” points usually do not support anything except muddy thinking, especially if the points are descriptive examples. Having students list “reasons why” the thesis is true as if they were ticking off the nightly specials on a menu gives them no insight into the kind of logical thinking that we know demands evidence for claims, or uses evidence to produce a conclusion. The mere task of categorizing information does not lead students to insights about counterarguments, limiting factors—in other words, it leaves them in the dark about the quality of the support they present.
An example of how limiting the use of the five paragraph essay can be occurred in my C-level class recently. (As we all know, one example doesn’t prove anything. But I’ll present it anyway.) One young woman was confiding her discomfort with the kinds of questions and writing tasks required in Academic Systems. Thinking I was encouraging her, I said, “Well, these tasks just require a little thought.” “Oh,” she responded. “We never learned that in 098. We just learned ‘thesis-paragraph’…like that.” I don’t think she meant to say she had never learned to think in 098. Nevertheless, that is what she said.
Of course, students adapt to new expectations, as this student did. But a happy ending doesn’t necessarily justify the means. As I said before, we know that writing is really a messy business, but we try to present it as goof-proof. And we fully understand the rules of logic, yet we let students mimic logical processes without really engaging in them. I could understand the reasons for this if our students had not yet reached the developmental stage for higher-order thinking, but our students are adult. So why should we hide the truth from them?
While I’m complaining about the five-paragraph essay (or is it the way it is used that bothers me?), I might as well divulge my other reservation: The five paragraph essay is too easy to grade. Not that I object to easy work, but I’m concerned with how an instructor’s approach to student writing may devolve into a hunt for such things as sentence fragments and comma splices. Goodness knows, we like our essays without a whiff of grammatical inconsistency. However, a pleasing series of “revised” five paragraph essays may delude us into thinking that the student’s grammar problems have gone away, when in fact they have simply been hidden under a thick application of “help” from the Learning Lab or elsewhere, only to resurface, to the ire of the English 101 or 102 teacher encountering this later on in the student’s career. I suspect, again, that the easy handling and accessibility of the five-paragraph format confounds us into thinking that a student has managed her writing problems, when in fact, she has simply figured out how to manage us.
In short, I have mixed feelings about the five-paragraph essay. I’m pretty sure it’s not a sensitive enough tool to yield a valid measurement of our students’ progress, and I have strong doubts about its efficacy as means to that progress. So I would advocate for, at least, some nuanced discussion of how, and how often, it should be used. But I would also suggest that to focus the discussion on a given method or product is to ignore the reality: people, not pedagogy, drive the learning process. In my opinion (please excuse that expression), it’s the human factors that count.
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2004